Joe Nuthin's Guide to Life

By Helen Fisher

A thoroughly uplifting novel about a neurodivergent young man who unexpectedly builds a community and saves a friend in need by following—in a way only he can—his mother’s words of wisdom.

Joe-Nathan likes the two parts of his name separate, just like dinner and dessert. Mean Charlie at work sometimes calls him Joe-Nuthin. But Joe is far from nothing. Joe is a good friend, good at his job, good at making things and at following rules, and he is learning how to do lots of things by himself.

Joe’s mother knows there are a million things he isn’t yet prepared for. While she helps to guide him every day, she is also writing notebooks of advice for Joe, of all the things she hasn’t yet told him about life and things he might forget.

By following her advice, Joe’s life is about to be more of a surprise than he expects. Because he’s about to learn that remarkable things can happen when you leave your comfort zone, and that you can do even the hardest things with a little help from your friends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Release date: May 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781982142728

Helen Fisher

Dr. Helen Fisher, referred to by Time magazine as “the queen mum of romance research,” is an internationally renowned biological anthropologist and one of the world’s leading experts in the science of human attraction. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, she studies the brain in love. And with her long-standing research, she helped develop one of the fastest-growing online relationship sites, Chemistry.com, a subsidiary of Match.com. Introduced in February 2006, Chemistry.com features the Chemistry Personality Test and Matching System, both developed by Fisher. To date, more than seven million people have taken the test, which is available in forty countries. In addition to serving as the chief scientific adviser for Chemistry.com, Fisher has authored several books and many articles in scientific journals and popular magazines. Her perspective on love, sexuality, women, and gender differences is regularly featured in major news outlets, including The Today Show, CNN, National Public Radio, BBC, and The New York Times. As a research professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University, she focuses on the role of biology in human sex, love, and marriage. Fisher’s widely anticipated book Why Him? Why Her? (Henry Holt and Company; January 20, 2009) proves her scientific hypotheses about why we are attracted to one person rather than another. Why Him? Why Her? follows Fisher’s 2004 book, Why We Love (Henry Holt), which was translated into sixteen languages. It discussed her research on the brain physiology, evolution, and worldwide expression of romantic love. In her 1999 book, The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World—which received the New York Times Book Review Notable Book award and was published in fourteen languages—she discussed gender differences in the brain and behavior, and the impact of women on twenty-first-century business, sex, and family life. Fisher’s other books include Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray (1992), also a New York Times Notable Book, with nineteen foreign-language editions; and The Sex Contract: The Evolution of Human Behavior (1982), translated into five languages. Her articles have appeared in The Journal of Comparative Neurology, Journal of Neurophysiology, Archives of Sexual Behavior, Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, The Journal of NIH Research, Psychology Today, Natural History, New Scientist, The New York Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other journals, magazines, and books.

Book preview

Prologue

Entry from the yellow book of advice

FEAR

It is so easy to let fear overwhelm you in this world. If you look at things in a particular way, it is always possible to see the fear or the danger in them. But what that really means is that if you look at those things in another particular way, it is possible to see the goodness and the possibilities in things instead. And not just in things, but people too.

Sometimes things frighten us, and we don’t really know why. Like the way you’re scared of red pasta sauces and ketchup, ever since your dad cut off the end of his finger when he showed you how to use the jigsaw in the workshop. You made a connection between the fear you felt when you saw your father in pain (and all that blood) and the pasta sauce you had for dinner that night. But you know that pasta sauce isn’t the same thing, only the same color, and yet it frightens you. What I’m trying to say is that while it’s okay to be frightened sometimes—even if our reasons for it don’t seem to make sense—don’t let fear dictate or direct you.

Instead of fearing a thing, try to understand it.

Because understanding can change everything about the way that you feel.

1

A man of no mean bones

Joe-Nathan’s mum, Janet, always told him he didn’t have a mean bone in his body, and he was thinking this as he wheeled a trolley of go-backs round the store: returning items that had been picked up by customers in one aisle and put down in another. He was certain that candles—for example—felt lost and lonely when they were abandoned among jars of peanut butter or the towels, certain that they were relieved to be reunited with their own candle-kind. Joe liked to think that if he were displaced, someone would do the same for him.

Joe worked hard to prove his mother right and to try to make other people feel the same way about him. To be considered a man of no mean bones was his raison d’être.

There’s a spill on aisle five, said Hugo, putting one hand on Joe’s trolley and tilting his head as though he felt bad asking him to clean it up. You okay to do it?

Joe saluted. Yes, sir, what color is it? Is it red?

It’s just milk, and please don’t call me sir. I may be old enough to be your father, but only just! If you call me ‘sir,’ you’ll make me feel really old. He whispered the next sentence as though it were a secret. I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable being the boss. Just call me Hugo.

Hugo Boss, said Joe without humor (because none was intended) and saluted again. He tried not to look at Hugo’s short fuzz of closely shaved hair, which covered his head from the apex to the nape of his neck. He always felt the urge to polish it clean so it was nice and shiny like his dad’s head used to be.

Hugo smiled. Okay, Joe. So, aisle five?

Sir!

No, don’t call me ‘sir,’ Hugo said again. "Remember, I’m old but not that old." And suddenly he was a whole aisle away, shaking his head and looking at his clipboard.

As soon as the milk had been mopped, Joe returned to his go-backs. He was a good mopper and cleaned the mop meticulously when he was finished. Hugo Boss was nice, and Joe knew he would never have asked him to clean up on aisle five if the spillage had been red.

Joe had worked at The Compass Store for five years. When he came for his interview (accompanied by his mum) he was overwhelmed by the variety of things for sale. The apparent chaos of the place made him sweat and he couldn’t wait to get home. Hugo had said he was keen to have someone like Joe on board, and not just because it looked good on the stats, but because he felt that Joe would be a positive influence and set a good example. He was offered the job, but wanted to turn it down, because—he told his mum—the place just doesn’t make sense.

He has OCD, Janet had said, when she explained on the phone why Joe wouldn’t be taking the job.

I understand, Hugo had said. I really do. Would you come back in again and let me explain to Joe-Nathan how the store works? When he understands, it might just appeal to him.

---

This place is called The Compass Store because the layout is designed around areas designated to north, south, east, and west, as well as northeast and east-northeast and so on, Hugo explained. He led Joe to the very center of the shop where a large mosaic of a compass was embedded in the floor and handed him a real compass (for sale on aisle three) and told him to go ahead and check: the mosaic was accurate.

"If you ever get lost, make your way to the mosaic, stand on the arrow pointing west, and walk straight ahead, you’ll come to my office and I’ll help you find your way. There’s a lot of things in this store, Joe, and to the untrained eye they may not appear to make sense, but for most things, there is a link, a reason, and most certainly a place."

At that moment, a girl with bobbed black hair, red lips, and chewing gum walked by with a trolley that said go-backs on it. She winked at Joe and snapped her gum; the smell of smoke and Juicy Fruit was in her wake. Joe tried to wink back but did a long blink instead. She smiled at him with a perfect gap between her two front teeth. The manager explained what the go-backs were, and Joe suddenly found himself interested.

Do you like puzzles? Hugo asked.

Joe nodded. Jigsaws.

He can make his own jigsaws, said Janet. His dad taught him how.

Can he really? Hugo had paused, put his hands on his hips, and looked at Joe with respect.

Well, think of this place like a big jigsaw: every day, people move a few pieces around and we put them back where they belong. And we sell things too! Let’s not forget that!

And you clean? said Joe, watching an overweight, bespectacled man with a hearing aid push an enormous two-pronged broom casually down the center of the store.

You like things clean and tidy? said the manager. "Then this really is the place for you. We need you."

Joe turned slowly in the middle of the mosaic; his soft brown eyes scanned his surroundings. He liked the bright white background and the shiny white floors. He liked that customers moved around like slow-moving traffic, never bumping into each other. Where he could see that the bottles and cans and clothes and books were neatly stacked, he felt comfortable, but when he saw something out of place, on its side, or out of alignment, it snagged his senses like a rough fingernail.

There was the girl again: at southeast. He watched as she moved to east-southeast and put something on a shelf. Her black bobbed hair was a sharp contrast to the white store, and nothing about her looked out of place; she looked like she completely belonged. She was cool; Joe recognized that. She saw him watching and gave a little wave and another one of her gappy smiles.

2

Epitaphs

Making sure that her son had a secure job with a nice manager somewhere that was walking distance from home was one of the most important things on Janet’s list to help Joe-Nathan prepare for independent life. There were plenty of things on Janet’s list, and eventually she turned that list into a book—with a woven blue cover—handwritten in Janet’s perfect cursive. Sometimes she sighed when she looked at her own handwriting and said to Joe, "They teach people how to write, but these days they don’t teach anyone how to write beautifully."

She was a humble woman, but even she could not deny the beauty of her script. She took the greatest care over it and was proud to lay out her shopping lists and writing on the calendar with unhurried devotion.

---

Every Saturday, Janet and her son went for a long walk. Joe liked cemeteries best, and although there had been a time when Janet worried that this was morbid, she quickly came to share his fascination with gravestone epitaphs. It must have been about five years ago—when Joe’s dad, Mike, had died—that he began to search for cemeteries on the internet and ask his mum to take him to them. He liked the small, gnarled cemeteries often found in villages. He got to know the names of the people in the ground there and saw a pattern in the flowers that were left at some graves and not others. He liked the larger cemeteries that felt more like towns with wide, lonely streets, where he recognized some of the names from previous visits, but many were like strangers, because he couldn’t see and memorize all of them. Most of all, Joe loved the epitaphs.

One sunny day on one of their Saturday walks, Joe asked his mum an important question.

Why are there words on the headstone? Why not just the name and the dates of the dead person?

Well, I suppose…, said Janet, hesitating. I suppose that at the end of a life, after all the lovely words have been said in the eulogy, people tend to whittle down the lives of others into a few words, maybe a sentence or two. They are words that tell the world how they should be remembered.

Dad’s says, ‘Beloved husband and father.’

"Yes, it does. It’s how he would want to be remembered."

But he was an accountant. Shouldn’t he be remembered for what he did?

Janet smiled and linked her arm a little more tightly into Joe’s. She lowered her voice. I don’t think your dad would like it if strangers passed by his grave and thought that the only thing he was remembered for was money. In life, love is the important thing. At the end, if you have loved and been loved, then that’s what you want to share with the world.

But funny people want to be remembered for being funny, said Joe.

Do they? I suppose they do.

Yes. Spike Milligan’s epitaph says, ‘I told you I was ill.’ So, if a funny person wants to always be remembered for being funny, why wouldn’t Dad want people to know how good he was at woodworking and DIY and with balance sheets and financial statements?

"Goodness, Joe, I worry what you’ll put on my headstone!"

I think it should say something about how lovely and clean you keep the house. Joe was earnest, unsmiling. Janet clung ever tighter to the arm of her honest, simple, kindhearted boy.

Oh dear! she said. Anything about love?

Yes. Love, indeed. But also, your very nice packed lunches.

Janet stopped and turned so that she was face-to-face with her son. They stood among the trees, alive with whispering leaves and the sounds of birds they could not see. They both looked up, aware of the lack of everyday noise enabling them to hear these things. She reached up and stroked her thumb over his cheek and swept a strand of dark, windblown hair behind his ear.

Would you like me to give you a shave later, and cut your hair?

Yes, please, said Joe.

"And I’ll trim your nails and you can have a nice bath, and we’ll get some fish and chips. And then we can watch Friends on TV."

Thanks, Mum, said Joe, wondering why his mum’s eyes were wet, when she had only described a really pleasant evening ahead and there was nothing to be sad about. Nothing to be sad about at all.

Are you upset? he asked, and when she said no, there was no reason not to believe her.

Joe crooked his arm like a gentleman. My lady, he said, and his mum bowed slightly and hooked her arm through his again. Where the route divided into two, they took the left and wandered slowly along the sun-dappled pathway.

It’s just up here, said Joe. My favorite.

Janet and Joe soon found themselves standing in front of a grave abundant with cut flowers, with little cards attached that Joe craned to read. They both stared at the words on the stone:

SHE ALWAYS SAID HER FEET WERE KILLING HER

BUT NOBODY BELIEVED HER

It’s funny, said Joe. And clever. Which is why I like it so much.

I know, said Janet.

Who do you think brings all these flowers?

I couldn’t tell you. Janet’s brow creased. I guess it’s because this grave is anonymous, people overcompensate, feeling that this person—whoever she was—might not have anyone to come visit her.

Is it attention-seeking?

Janet opened her mouth and hesitated; attention-seeking was not something she associated with graves, but she could see where Joe was coming from. In a way, I guess. Dad doesn’t need anything on his headstone except that he was loved, by us. In the end, that’s better than a joke and a lot of flowers from strangers, isn’t it?

I guess, said Joe, thinking about Mean Charlie at work, who was always making Owen laugh with his jokes. Can we go home now?

3

The rain could get to you

The front door of their house was for strangers. Joe-Nathan could not remember a time when the back door—on the right-hand side at the end of the short drive—was anything other than the only way in or out. A plastic corrugated awning was erected over the back door and it extended all the way to the garage. Joe liked the way the sun struggled to shine through the yellowing roof; lumps of dark moss were visible in places where it had fallen from the tiles on the house and the result was a homey, muffled, buttery light. As soon as he stepped under the awning, Joe felt safe and dry. His father had erected this covering himself so that if Janet came home in the rain, she could take her time finding her keys in her handbag and not worry about her perm or her shoes getting wet. It also meant that his wife and son could leave the house, get into the car, and reverse down the driveway without the rain touching them. That was the kind of person his dad had been, Joe thought, the kind who knew that the rain could get to you, but not once you arrived at your own back door, not if he could help it.

Janet held her handbag against her stomach and stood back so that Joe could access the door. For a moment he looked blankly at her, but she nodded encouragingly at the keyhole, until he said, Oh. He pulled at the strap over his shoulder so that his satchel swung round to the front, and he unclipped it.

Janet had bought him the brown leather satchel for his birthday last year, and when he left for work in the mornings he took his satchel from the hook on the wall by the back door in the kitchen and—like a mantra—they would chant: keys, wallet, phone; keys, wallet, phone. But even at the weekends, whenever they went out (even when Janet had her keys), she made sure Joe took his satchel with him.

It’s like a game, said Janet to Joe as he traced a finger over the shiny buckle and lifted the bag to his face to sniff it. If you aim to have those three things with you at all times, then even if you forget—or lose—one of them, you’ll be okay. If you have your keys, you can always get back into the house. If you have your phone, you can always call someone for help. Your boss at work has a key for the house, you know, so if you ever need to, you can call Hugo and he’ll help you. And it’s always best to have your wallet in case you need a taxi, or money for food and drink, or any other emergency.

Emergency? said Joe, eyeing her over the top of his bag.

Just in case, pet, Janet had said, but she couldn’t help hoping that one day she would feel confident enough in Joe’s ability to keep himself safe that she could maybe have a night away at a spa with a friend, like she used to when Mike was alive.

Can I clean this with shoe polish? Joe ran his hand across the smooth leather of the satchel.

I don’t see why not; it’s made of the same thing as shoes. Janet rose from the table to get the polish and a cloth from the cupboard under the sink. She hesitated, and sat back down again. You know where it is, don’t you, love?

Janet had tried to teach Joe the obvious practical things like how to tidy and clean; use the washing machine and dryer; how to hang things on the line; how to stack the dishwasher and when to top it up with salt and rinse aid. She had taught him how to have food like cereal in the house, so that he could eat even if he forgot to go shopping, and that it was a good idea to always keep a loaf of bread in the freezer. She encouraged him to sniff the milk before he poured it, and had taught him to cook five different meals: spaghetti carbonara; curry with microwave rice; sausage with mash and cabbage; minced beef and onions on a jacket potato; and chicken with vegetables. Janet also took Joe to the pub after work every Friday, because she felt that it was nice for a person to mark the beginning of the weekend with a few beers or a sherry, and it was one of her dearest hopes that he might one day take up the habit with some friends his own age.

Saturday night was a good night for a takeaway, Janet had told her son. She toyed with the idea of explaining that he didn’t have to have one every Saturday and he shouldn’t have one more than once a week. But with Joe it was better to keep things simple; having too many options stressed him. So, Saturday night was takeaway night: fish and chips or Chinese.

But inevitably Janet hadn’t shown him how to do everything, and whenever she spotted a gap in his knowledge, she worked with him to form a pattern of useful behavior: how to unlock the door and lock it back up again (she had always done it herself because when they got home, they just wanted to get in, nice and quick). She had shown him how to check if the kettle felt heavy before he pressed the button, in case he burned out the element by boiling it dry; how not to put anything metal in the microwave; where to find things in the house, even if they weren’t used very often, like the shoe polish or the sewing kit. However, it felt like there were a million things she hadn’t prepared him for, and when she dreamed of a weekend away—just a little me-time—she felt the weight of these gaps.

Joe suspected that his mum was slowing down, because she had started asking him to do every little thing that she had always busied herself with. But in fact, Janet was speeding up—in a hurry to live more of life—taking steps to try to ensure that her son could cope on his own, and not just survive, but enjoy independence. She didn’t want to think of him frustrated and crying, fruitlessly opening and closing all the cupboard doors in a hunt for the shoe polish to clean his leather satchel while she was elsewhere having her nails done before a nice massage and lunch. No, there was work to be done before Janet would feel any kind of ease at leaving Joe to fend for himself, even if it was for just one night.

4

Imperial Leather

All the things that Janet taught Joe-Nathan to do were written down clearly—and beautifully—in the pale-blue, faint-lined, hard-backed notebook and kept in a drawer in the kitchen along with things like guarantees for appliances, a small selection of takeaway menus, candles, some matches, and a telephone-and-address book, which included the numbers of trusted plumbers, electricians, their neighbors, Hazel and Angus, and Lucy, Joe’s social worker.

The blue book was divided mainly into rooms in the house so that, for example, the section entitled Living Room included everything to do with the television as well as the furniture and how to clean it. The section labeled Kitchen was the thickest, because there were so many things to use in there, a lot of things that could go wrong, or break, and that were used frequently, but it didn’t include cooking, which was under Food—another very long section of the book—complete with recipes and daily menu ideas.

Sometimes Janet and Joe would play a game where she would ask him a question and he would try to find the answer in the blue book, even if he already knew it. When he was tense, Joe couldn’t think properly and so if—for example—something went wrong with the microwave, he might not be able to think through what to do, how to reset it, even if he had known what to do in a dummy run. The important thing was to at least know where to look in the book.

---

Janet put a white plastic bag, smelling deliciously of fish and chips wrapped in warm, vinegar-soaked paper, on the counter and put a couple of plates in the microwave.

Joe, get the blue book and see what we should do.

He extracted the book from the drawer and sat at the kitchen table with it, smoothing his hand over the cover as he had seen people do in films just before they opened important books. He turned to the section labeled Food, and searched for the subsection:

TAKEAWAYS

Fish and chips

When you have collected the fish and chips bring it home and leave it on the kitchen counter in its bag. Wash your hands. The ketchup is in the fridge, the vinegar is in the low cupboard to the right of the oven, and the salt is on the table. Get out a plate and a knife and fork. Kitchen towels are next to the sink.

I need to wash my hands, said Joe, and then I’ll get all these things out. He left the book open and climbed the stairs to the bathroom. He filled the sink with water and held the bar of Imperial Leather in the palm of his hand. The soap was almost finished and had that satisfying peak under the little label, which always took longer than the rest of the soap to wear away. He washed his hands, and let the water out, sluicing the bowl to get rid of the scum. He dried his hands and carefully laid the thin bar of soap on a towel. He returned to the bathroom cabinet above the sink and opened the mirrored door. He hummed gently to himself—the theme tune to Friends—as his eyes roamed the little cupboard for the tweezers. He found them, and when he shut the cupboard door—distracted as he was—he made himself jump when his face popped into view in the mirror.

Oh! Hello! he said without thinking, and then chuckled. How do you do? he said to the friendly man in the mirror.

Very well, thank you, the man replied.

And what are you doing with the tweezers?

Well, when the soap gets very thin, I take the sticker off the top, very carefully with the tweezers, so I don’t rip it: it’s red and gold and says ‘Imperial Leather’ on it, in curly writing. It’s like a stamp, but for soap.

How does the little sticker stay on the soap for so long, when it is always getting wet?

I have no idea; it is one of life’s great mysteries.

"And why do you remove it?" asked the man in the mirror. But Joe wouldn’t answer; he just stared back solemnly for a moment. Then he kneeled on the floor in front of the soap, his tongue between his lips—his face a couple of inches from the sticker—and carefully peeled it off. He walked with it to his bedroom and went straight to the stamp album in the middle of his large, well-organized desk. He had placed the album there earlier, open and ready, knowing it was time for the sticker to be taken off the soap. He put a spot of glue in the next space in the album and with great care he laid the sticker onto the glue, patting it gently into place with the flat side of the tweezers.

Without closing the album on the new—still wet—addition, Joe lifted the previous pages to have a look back through the book. There were sixty Imperial Leather stickers in the album now. Sixty soaps had been used since Joe’s dad had died (about one whole soap each month for five whole years). It was a lot of stickers, a lot of soaps. A long time to miss a person.

Joe left the sticker to dry, returned the tweezers to the bathroom cabinet, and joined his mum in the kitchen for his dinner.

5

A jigsaw is only ever one piece

Joe-Nathan was only ten years old when his dad built the workshop at the end of the garden. Whenever his dad had a project—like building the awning over the back door, or erecting a new fence between their house and the neighbor’s—Joe saw a lot more of his father’s forearms, because Mike would say Right and fold up his shirtsleeves after work, like a man committed to getting a job done. Every weekday evening and every weekend for about six weeks, Mike worked on the building and gave Joe jobs (he was—his dad told him—a great help. Usually).

The workshop wasn’t a rough affair; it was lovely. Mike had drawn plans with pictures to show where the workbench would be, and where the wood, the tools, and the paint would be kept. Joe sat on the steps of the workshop one day; his job was to color the plan in, and he added his own illustrations: colorful curtains up at the windows and the outside painted powder blue. On the day that it was finished, Mike and Janet had taken Joe to the end of the garden to show him that she had made the curtains just the way Joe had drawn them, and his dad had painted the outside in the exact same blue color that Joe had used in his picture. That had been fun. But nothing was as fun as being inside the workshop and making things.

At first Joe loved taking a rough piece of wood, cutting it to a satisfying square or rectangular shape, and sanding it down until it was as smooth as the heel of a baby’s foot. When he was adept at that, Mike showed him how a lot of things could start in roughly that way: take a piece of wood, cut it into shape, smooth it down. And then more things could happen: drill holes in the wood, join pieces together with hinges, attach handles, paint it. The options were endless.

Just think of something you would like to make, and break it down into components, his dad said. Make a plan, and take on one task at a time, so that it’s never overwhelming.

When Mike had first suggested making jigsaws, Joe had said, But that is too many pieces to start with. I think we should do something simpler.

"But a jigsaw is only ever one piece, Joe. No matter how many parts you break it into, it is one simple shape, in the end. One simple image. It’s like people: people are made up of lots of different parts, full of ideas and problems and idiosyncrasies. If we always had to look at people as all their different parts, we’d probably think it was too much hard work to get to

Reviews for Joe Nuthin's Guide to Life

[rmarcin-630843 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

4.5 stars
I really enjoyed this story about Joe-Nathan, a neuro-divergent man with OCD. His mother wanted to make sure that Joe was prepared for life should something happen to her. He worked at The Compass Store, which he loved, because it was laid out just like a compass. Chloe, a co-worker, and Hugo, the boss, looked out for Joe-Nathan. But his mom writes him a guide to life, practical lessons for what he should do for anything he might encounter. This includes food, cleaning, but more importantly, friendship and love. He takes this to heart when dealing with Mean Charlie, another co-worker.
This is such a wonderful, kind story.

[krau0098 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got an eGalley of this book through NetGalley to review.

Thoughts: For some reason I was under the impression that this was a magical realism type of read...I think in NetGalley it was under sci-fi/fantasy. This was not that type of read at all. This is flat out a contemporary fiction about a neurodivergent young man who has to deal with living on his own after his mother passes away.

The beginning is a bit slow and Joe's mom doesn't pass away until quite a bit into the book. At this point things get much more interesting. I did find this to be an engaging read. The chapters are fairly short, which helped propel me through the story. I didn't want to put this down because I wanted to know what was going to happen.

Fisher does an excellent job writing both Joe's character and the people surrounding him. At its heart this book is about friendship and supporting the people around you, even when they are a bit different.

Joe's mom remains a steadfast presence throughout the book with her constant advice through the notebooks she leaves Joe. These excerpts from her notebooks can get a bit long and preachy feeling, although some of them were cute and humorous too. I couldn't help but think that maybe Joe's mom did him a disservice by making Joe too dependent on her. It's when Joe is really forced to start figuring things out for himself that he really starts to flourish. This is something his mom could have helped him do earlier if she had pushed him outside of his comfort zone more often.

This was a nice, heartwarming read, that was straightforward in the story structure and yet complex in how the characters interact with each other. It was a decent break from all the fantasy I read (even though I totally wasn't expecting this to be what it was).

My Summary (4/5): Overall I liked this, it was a bit slow to start but ended up being very engaging. I would recommend if you are intrigued by watching a neurodivergent person navigate life and if you enjoy stories about unlikely friends banding together to help each other. It is a sweet and heartfelt story and is well written.